Guide for Enabling Author Tracking in WordPress
Do you want to learn how to enable author tracking in WordPress? This post is for you. If your website uses multi-authors, then you definitely want to learn what each author writes about and who has the most popular posts. This is only possible with author tracking. But how exactly do you go about this?
Install Monster Insight
The first thing you have to do is install and activate MonsterInsights. This is the best Google Analytics plugin on WordPress. You will have to activate the pro plan in order to get the custom dimensions’ features. After activating, go to insights>>Settings page from the admin area and enter the license key. Thereafter you have to connect your website to your Google Analytics account. Click on ‘Connect MonsterInsights’ button to continue. On-screen instructions will be provided to guide you through. After that Google Analytics will track all your website traffic. You can now go ahead and enable author tracking in WordPress.
Set author custom dimension
To get accurate tracking you will have to set author custom dimensions. To do this go to Insights>>Addons page. You then need to click the Install button next to the Custom Dimensions addon. After installation visit Insights>>Settings page and switch to ‘Conversions’ tab. Scroll to the Custom Dimensions box. From here you can add a new custom dimension.
To add a new custom dimension, you need to click on ‘Add New Custom Dimension’ button and then choose ‘Author’ from the drop-down menu. The ID is filled automatically. Save the changes once you are done.
Next you need to set custom dimension in Google Analytics. Go to Google Analytics dashboard and switch to All Website Data view. Click ‘Admin’ button located at the bottom left corner of your screen and choose Custom Definitions>>Custom Dimensions located under Property column. Click ‘New Custom Dimension’ and type in ‘Author’ for the name and then leave all other details unchanged. Click ‘Create’ once you are done and Google Analytics will save the changes. Ignore the code in the next screen and click ‘Done’. On the next page that displays your Author custom dimension in a table with an index value, ensure the index value is the same as the one in custom dimensions in MonsterInsights. If not, you need to edit the value in MonsterInsights so that they match the ID in Google Analytics.
Viewing author tracking reports
You will be able to view the author traffic data on your WordPress dashboard. Go to Insights>>reports page and switch to Dimensions tab. You will be able to see the traffic for each author from here.